Intel’s first 10nm Cannon Lake Laptop spotted – Lenovo Ideapad 330

Intel has not had a great time manufacturing new CPUs on their new 10nm manufacturing process, so much so that Intel has been forced to release the same Skylake series processing cores for three hardware generations through Skylake, Kaby Lake and now Coffee Lake.   

10nm is said to be shipping in low quantities, pointing towards some major yield issues with the process, making it unsuitable for large core designs at this time, placing Intel in an awkward position. 

Now it looks like we have an answer to the question “where have Intel been shipping their low quantities of 10nm hardware?”, with Chinese retailers listing a new Lenovo notebook with a 10nm Cannonlake i3-8121U series CPU. 

This new notebook is a variant of Lenovo’s Ideapad 330, which pairs the new Intel CPU with a Radeon RX 540 graphics chip and lacks Intel integrated graphics. At this time it is unknown why the iGPU silicon is disabled in this dual-core processor. 

Intel’s release of this product as an 8th Generation dual-core hyperthreaded processor with disabled integrated graphics doesn’t paint an attractive picture for 10nm. This laptop sits in the low-end of the market, so don’t expect Intel to make a big deal of this new processor, given its low clock speeds, core count and lack of integrated graphics capabilities.